Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @11:08AM
from the beta-burning-fox dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla quietly posted the first beta build of its Firefox 4 browser early this morning. The 'Chromified' browser leaves a solid first impression with a few minor hiccups, but no surprises. If you have been using a previous version of Firefox 3.7, which now officially becomes Firefox 4.0, you should already feel comfortable with this new version. Mozilla has not posted detailed release notes yet, but there seem to be no major changes from Firefox 3.7a6-pre, with the exception that the browser is running more smoothly and with fewer crashes."Update: 06/29 18:40 GMT by S: Mozilla's Asa Dotzler writes, "Mozilla has not shipped Firefox 4 beta yet. We are in the process of making and testing the final set of changes, but we're not quite there yet." Changed headline to reflect this.

That's some nice eye candy. But will Firefox stay relevant? Chrome is coming up fast and Mozilla seems to be stagnating. It sad to be in a state where your only source of income is your competitor.

From an earlier post of mine:

Mozilla corporation seems to be pretty badly run. They solicited donations for the NYT ad(some of my poor college friends scraped together money for it) while overpaying the CEO($500K per year)! The management was supposed to find different ways of getting funding but Mozilla is still dependent totally on Google(which competes with it's own rival browser). Mozilla made $66 million in revenue just in 2006 while development was largely done by unpaid volunteers.

In the meantime, Firefox was quite bloated, crash prone and lost the speed race to Chrome, Thunderbird stagnated and nothing really innovative or useful came out of Mozilla labs. Ubuntu will probably switch to Chromium and Firefox will start losing search revenue. . Probably the only thing going for Firefox are extensions(Chrome supports extensions now) and proper Adblock. Things are so bad that the CEO is planning to step down

Firefox will still be used so long as Chrome maintains its policy of not really allowing any major customizations. Firefox lets you customize -EVERYTHING-, seriously, type in about:config in Firefox, until Chrome lets you do this, I for one will stay with Firefox because I've got it customized exactly how I like it and Chrome won't let me.

Almost everyone who really browses much. For example, on Linux on Chrome I can't use backspace to go back a page, for Firefox its disabled by default but I can enable it through about:config, Chrome doesn't allow me to even control basic history options that even IE lets you, etc.

In short, every single annoyance in the UI or the like in Firefox can be removed via about:config with Chrome there are no options.

Actually what made a friend of mine change was that FF has an add-on for the "image bar" that was removed from IE7:-)

Firefox is getting worse for customisation. They keep changing the UI and then removing preferences from about:config for no apparent reason other than they were associated with the old UI. Tabs are the worst for that. A lot of people used preferences like browser.link.open_external which allowed new window links to open in the same tab but still allowed external links (e.g. from an email pr

You should go look at the replies to your earlier post to see why this doesn't mean Mozilla is going down in flames. The CEO was planning on leaving within a year when he joined. The NY Times ad was just a fun way for people to get involved and get their names in the paper. The fact that Mozilla still gets the majority of money from Google doesn't mean they're not looking for other sources of income. Most Mozilla development is done by paid Mozilla employees. The $66 million revenue will help tide them over

The CEO planning on leaving within a year somehow justifies the needlessly fat paycheck?

. The fact that Mozilla still gets the majority of money from Google doesn't mean they're not looking for other sources of income.

It's what now, 6 years and still no success in cultivating other sources of income? I mean the management is paid top bucks for doing exactly that, right?

Most Mozilla development is done by paid Mozilla employees

Err, that wasn't quite what we heard when we were complaining about bloat and memory leaks. All we got was 'if you don't like it, fork it' and we had no right to complain because it was the work of unpaid volunteers working in their free time.

I mean, if people are getting paid, how hard is it to assign them boring tasks but which matter a lot to the end user? It's not just about scratching your itch when you're getting paid.

. The $66 million revenue will help tide them over if they stop receiving funding from Google. Firefox is not getting bloated or crash-prone

To be fair, Firefox is still a great browser. No, it's not as fast as Chrome, but I think that's the worst thing that can be said about it. Compared to IE, it's a marvel of engineering. It's not particularly bloated or crash prone. It's just... slower than Chrome.

I find Thunderbird to be a little more disappointing, but I don't think anyone other than Microsoft is actually interested in building a good mail client these days. Too many people are moving to web mail, so mail clients seem passé.

1) Extensions. If Chrome's base of extensions approaches a usable level (not comparable to FF - most people don't use that many extensions), then FF's advantage in this area goes away completely. Chrome's extensions are much less painful to install.

2) UI. Chrome's interface is generally less capable than that of FF. Chrome keeps improving, true, but it's not changing the UI much at all, so I don't think th

Chrome is nice, but firefox scrolls smoother, renders faster as it scrolls and displays. Chrome still lacks real ad blocking capabilities, as it still downloads the ad in the background, but it doesnt not display it. Firefox has color management, albeit broken and not up to date color management, but it still has color management. Chrome displays images without any color management which really screws with anyone who cares to display their images properly. Safari has the best color management, but its safar

- FF will almost certainly get hardware acceleration before Chrome. From Chromium blog, "the image data must be transferred to the main browser process before it can be drawn to the screen, which limits the possible approaches we can take". They have to re-architect a bunch of stuff to get hardware acceleration.

- FF is getting a new, cleanly written HTML5 renderer to replace gecko.

The new UI is terrible, and appears to be trying to (badly) emulate Chrome. The worst part is that, by default, minimize/maximize/close buttons are not present, which hurts usability badly. The good news is that this can be restored to the previous UI with a few clicks... I hope that options remains present in the final release.

I'm quite happy with the UI. The real changes that I can see are the ability to hide most toolbars, and the transparency (On Windows, haven't booted my laptop for the Linux test). I also have all the buttons. Maybe you have a conflict from an old theme?

Seriously? That's ludicrously bad design. I used to be a huge Firefox booster; now... well, at least it's still better than IE.

This is beating a dead horse, but the 'awesomebar' signaled to me that Mozilla was taking the browser in the entirely wrong direction. Flash over efficiency, bloat over speed, and a desire to manipulate rather than please the consumer. They've made plenty of decisions since then in the same vein.

no, really, the awesomebar is a good thing. We just took a while to get used to it - but once you did, it works wonderfully.

Ok, I'd like to be able to tell it to only store 'root' links, not every damn link of a shopping site, one entry per item I've viewed; and to ignore some entries, but otherwise its replaced my bookmark menu for some sites! Oh, and you can turn it off, ok, which should please even you!

Ditto. I don't dislike Chrome as a browser, but I hate the UI- its everything I hate in a UI, and more. From replacing labels with abstract pictures, to hiding menus within super-menus instead of having toolbars.

I can only hope the default GNOME version is more sane, as I do hate having to replace "themes".

Yes, but you can't customize Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE, etc. to the extent that you can Firefox. Customization is Firefox's killer feature and unless suddenly Google added About:config support in Chrome, it will be the reason why people will use Firefox.

a) rendering speed was generally very good
b) while I did not have issues of 'crashing', I did have issues
with seemingly random pegging of the cpu.
c) start up time to restore multiple open tabs was unpredictable -
sometimes very quick other times never finished (a named tag but blank page)
d) most, if not all, extensions no longer work and the usual workarounds
seemed to stop working too. this was #*! annoying.

Somehow everyone seems to miss, that this “Chromification” actually is a Opera-ism, which was from the very beginning designed like this, because it had tabs from the very beginning.It’s funny how everything always comes back to Opera’s choices of detail implementation being the best.

I, for one, thank the only innovators in the business. There’s a reason they are the only ones who are remotely profitable with making browsers.

It's not difficult to understand: It just means they posted a notice without that annoying embedded MIDI music that was so popular in the mid-1990s playing in the background. For example, when my company wants to loudly announce something, we'll post a notice on our main web page with a recording of vuvuzelas at full blast. It really gets everyone's attention.

Tell me about it. Do you how annoying it is to walk into the office and see memory dribbling out of the computer because of the browser?! I hate it! And my IT support company: PHB IT Services says that memory leaks are actually an OSHA violation and if someone slips on that memory, I could be sued for MILLIONS! So I pay them to come in a clean up all that memory leaking.

My father-in-law hates Firefox. After spending three hours installing all the add-ons he thought looked good, it ran like molasses and crashed all the time.
You did ask:-)

Well, addons would indeed be the logical thing to ask about when people are apparently having so much trouble with Firefox. I only use Adblock Plus (but I've had probably up to 6 addons installed at once before, all privacy and ad related) and have (almost) always been solidly stable.

I say "almost" because this discussion has reminded me of a time when an addon was causing the Firefox process to hang on exit. It was happening to my friend too. After we uninstalled the addon, the problem disappeared. And eve

"This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel...total loss of all basic motor skills: Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue-severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally...you can actually watch yourself behaving in the terrible way, but you can't control it."

Looking at the past few releases of Firefox, the developers just simply do not care to address it like the problem has been solved. Yet, they continue to perfect their crash and restart tools so when the browser does become unstable (and it always becomes unstable for me after a few hours of hard use) restarting is at least not too painful. Yet, this reeks of addressing the symptom instead of the cause. Have a problem with the browser? Restart it. Yes -- firefox has become the Windows 95 of browsers.

I'd wish they'd just slow down, take a breath, and get their house in order. I'd rather have a stable browser instead of the latest flavor of the month feature addition.

What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems? I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.

Do you open flash heavy sites? or sites with video inside? big sites ?
For me, all it takes is one site with flash, to take down firefox.
I am using Fedora 13 64-Bit.
However I do agree that the possible origin of this is flash and not firefox, because normal sites with little or no flash leave firefox stable.

I'm also using Fedora 13 64-bit with Firefox 3.6.4 and I see no stability problems at all. I open sites with Flash all the time. I'm using the 64-bit Flash version 10.0.45.0. Is there a particular site that gives you trouble?

Ok same configuration concerning Firefox and flash version.
any particular site ? I would say no.
However i can safely say, sites like youtube are safe to open. However I most likely be on course with instability with sites that have more than 1 flash based component inside. Or if I was playing a flash based game.
Anyway for more then a week now I switched to Chrome, because it was getting annoying. And I am not sensing any of those problems.
I don't have a lot of plugins installed.
So ???

Create a new profile and test a few flash heavy sites. If FF runs stable, change its preferences to what you used in your old profile, test again. If it still works, install any extension you have used one by one and test between each installation. Maybe one of your extensions or settings causes the problems, maybe your profile has become corrupted (likely if it is rather old).

If the problem persists, try a nightly build [mozilla.org], first with your old profile (backup!!!), then with a fresh one.

Release versions have been quite unstable on Flash heavy sites some time ago. I have switched to nightly builds several months ago and - barring the occasional hiccup when new features are introduced - have found it to run incredibly stable and performant even with a larger selection of extensions installed.

But I always run flashblock yet do allow Flash on certain sites like youtube.

So you might be right, Flash is still the main cause of browser instability.
Yet I thought the idea behind this 'Chromified' is to have tabs and processes run independently and thus a single bad page/tab should not take down the whole application.

<quote><p>Funny you mention that.</p><p>Two weeks ago, I had the following open at the same time (this is in addition to all my other "normal" tabs I leave open, like Facebook, Twitter, etc.): GameTrailers, Newgrounds, Kongregate, and,::blush:: Redtube. No problems, stability or otherwise.</p><p>For the record, I don't have a crazy PC either...quite average, by today's standards. From my [H]ard|Forum sig:</p><p>Display: Asus VH236H | Dell 2005FPWFoundation

The most up to date thing in my system is the processor, which is about six months old (or, at least, it was released six months ago. I only dropped it in there about a week ago, prior to which I was using an X2 5400+.) Other than that, the newest piece of hardware in my system is the 1.5 T hard drive, and that doesn't really impact performance. The video card, which is close to two years old at this point, is hardly a heavy hitter.

So, yes, by today's standards it is quite out of date. ATI 4850, DDR2 in

the reason why "flash sucks" is because the developers cant be asked to optimize their code for memory leaks.

saying "flash sucks" because it makes your browser crash is like saying "c++ sux" because the developer forgot to delete a pointer causing a memory leak to crash yer box. you would never say "c++ sux!". in fact, you might even say the opposite, that it would "blow yer leg off if yer not caref

My guess is these are the same people with like 234324324234234 extensions enabled and think that somehow Firefox should control it if a 14 year old with terrible coding practices makes an unstable extension.

Really, if you only have AdBlock installed, Firefox is pretty stable, and I'm even running nightly builds! It got a bit rocky about a week ago where it wouldn't start correctly and segfaulted when I clicked on a bookmark... But once it updated recently, it works just fine.

More to the point, they assume it's a problem with Firefox that all other users see, not a problem with how Firefox is installed or configured on their computer, so they don't bother to fix the problem. If they would go discuss the problems at the Mozilla support forum or MozillaZine, they would find that most others are not having these problems.

I'm not trying to find fault or lay blame. I'm pointing out that it's ridiculous to assume that because you have a problem with Firefox that everyone else sees the same problem. When you go out to your car in the morning and it doesn't start, do you say that your car manufacturer is making defective cars, or do you simply get it fixed? It has nothing to do with whose "fault" it is. It has to do with effectively dealing with problems instead of immediately assuming it is the fault with the manufacturer. Forget about whose fault it is!

Something can be borked about my hardware, like trying to run my car in -40C (or F) or whatever. But software doesn't break down the way cars do, unless cosmic rays flipped a bit in my executable. If cars worked as unreliably as browsers, in that if you hit exactly this curve under exactly those conditions while shifting gears and braking slightly the car would spontaneously combust there'd be a recall. If fact, if you're verified it on two machines of different setup I think you can safely assume this is a

I run the portable apps version of FF which takes a very long time to boot so I leave it open as much as possible. Anywhere from 2-20 tabs, usually runs for weeks at a time without problems. Of course, I only have three extensions installed, one that is massively established (adblock), one that is trivial (mobile barcode generator), and one that occasionally causes problems (Ubiquity). I suspect that people with stability and/or memory leak problems are running extensions which are the root cause. Perso

What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems? I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.

Ah. I typically have 300-400+ tabs open in multiple windows, for easy of cross-referencing without going backward and forward or digging around in bookmarks and waiting for pages to load. Firefox will randomly lockup once very other week or so (sometimes twice in one day, sometimes it'll be fine for a month). Oddly enough, it's not usually flash that causes the lockup, and memory leakage has never been a problem (rarely tops a gigabyte).

30-40 tabs? Fine, whatever. *300-400*? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? How the hell can you even manage to *find* the tabs you need? What, did you never learn about that fancy feature called "bookmarks"?

Bookmarks require you to reload the page, and are just a list anyway, with limitations on linking to specific locations on a page. Remembering where a few hundred tabs are is pretty easy (remember a few key tabs, remember the others in relation to those key tabs, judicious use of the crtl+tab(+shift) shortcuts), far easier than trying to wrangle any of the various 'content organiser' programs I've tried into a useful tool. The organisation software installed in my own brain still beats any I've installed on

a) Reloads... who really cares?b) No, they're a complete hierarchy for organization. They're only a list if you don't know how to use 'em.

But, whatever, if that's how you want to use FF, hey, go nuts. But don't complain if it starts to behave strangely. Any sane person should realize you're *way* outside of the "supported functionality" envelope and are basically abusing the tabbed browsing metaphor (badly).

I like to think of each window with tabs as a stack. One page leads you to another, push another tab on the stack. When you're done with that task, pop the tab off the stack. Bookmarks are too permanent. I may never need that tab again. But I might, so I'm glad it's there when I get back to it. Lots of times I'll come to a stopping point and close a bunch of tabs, going back a week or more. Then I'll dig up some tab that I had entirely forgotten about, would not have cared enough to bookmark, but it serves as a good start for more browsing.

But what's abusive about it? That style of browsing, to me, is what tabs are for.

I'm sorry, no, that's absolutely false.

The tab metaphor was *never* intended to accomodate *hundreds* of live tabs. If it were, there would be better mechanisms for organizing tabs, finding them, etc. No, the tab metaphor is meant for *maybe* dozens of tabs, tops.

I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.

I would typically have about 100+ tabs open towards the end of any given browsing day. Towards the end, opening say a Slashdot page would typically bring Firefox to a halt and running flash of any kind (they run anyway despite flashblock) will likely make the browser crash. How much of this is system issues (especially with sound) and how much is Firefox I cannot say, but I can tell you

I'm running a 3.5.10 build on Snow Leopard right now. I'm a web developer so i have the following extensions installed: Firebug, XMarks, and FireQuery. That's it. I stopped installing extensions when I learned that they could also cause crashes or memory leaks. I've stopped watching flash videos with firefox since it would escalate the software degredation so I watch all my vids in Safari as it doesn't spiral out of control. I never have more than six or seven tabs open at one time. In short, Firefox

I am continually baffled by people talking about how unreliable and crash-prone Firefox is.

On my laptop with Windows 7 (and XP before it) I have kept Firefox running for weeks at a time (I hibernate my laptop with Firefox running and hardly ever actually reboot it) under heavy usage; multiple windows, 30+ tabs in each window, many with Flash components and JS-intensive pages. I run Adblock, Noscript, Flashgot, Tree-style Tabs, Lazarus, Form History Control and several other add-ons. Firefox has crashed on me exactly once in the past year or so, and that seemed to be due to Flash. When that happened, Firefox restored my multi-window multi-tabbed session without an issue.

I run Firefox on my desktop workstation as well with similar results. Likewise on a EEE running Ubuntu. Contrary to reports from you and others, I've found it to be one of the most rock-solid application I've ever used.

While I realize anecdotes do not constitute data, I'm curious as to how you and others GET Firefox to crash so regularly!

I think the problem is not in firefox but in the addons, and many addons seem to have very poor memory handling. Almost all of my memory and performance problems went away when I uninstalled FasterFox. I now only have a essential addons -- noscript, flashblock, adblock, and a couple tiny ones. But I think that's why they're going about it the way they are.

Anyway most of the time people feel like Firefox is leaking while it isn't, due to caching. At least with verion 3.6.4 you can go to Edit -> Prefferences -> Advanced -> Network and specify the limit of what Firefox may cache.

At least with verion 3.6.4 you can go to Edit -> Prefferences -> Advanced -> Network and specify the limit of what Firefox may cache.

That's the disk cache, not the memory cache.

Also, the numbers reported by Firefox as "used memory cache" are about 10% of the total memory used on my system. So, Firefox claims that only 80MB are used for memory cache, while Windows reports that 800MB is being used by the firefox.exe process.

Why has Mozilla Foundation avoided fixing the biggest bugs in Firefox, the
memory leaks? Many, many people have complained about the memory leaks for the
last 5 years, at least, as did the parent comment.

Firefox leaks memory and eventually crashes Windows, or makes Windows
unstable. Apparently the Firefox memory leak bugs interact with some weakness
in Windows XP SP3, and that causes Windows to become unstable. It seems that
whoever debugs Firefox might also gain a good reputation from finding a major
pr

"Faster" and "more secure" are sexy new features. "Fixed memory leak we were blaming on plug-ins/add-ons/users/Microsoft/cosmic rays anyway" doesn't make such a good headline.

I thought the point of the Mozilla Foundation was to employ people to fix these kinds of un-sexy bugs that were being ignored by OS developers. Instead they seem to just want to break people's workflows as often as possible. "Innovation" (or in this case copying Chrome) for the sake of itself is not the same as "making it better".

202,704 [mozilla.com] crashes in the latest version in the last 14 days.

And?

Firefox's installed base is >250,000,000 users according to a quick Google search, so if those crashes are random then it means that less than 0.1% of Firefox users saw a crash in the last two weeks. More likely a large fraction of them are systematic crashes due to some crappy addon.

Either way, a 0.1% chance of a crash in two weeks is a pretty strange definition of 'unstable'.

I hate to break it to you, but as chrome adds those features it's going to slow down and get sluggish. Firefox has for some time beat Chrome on memory use. But, OTOH it's somewhat mooted by the fact that Chrome tends to spy and seems to thwart disabling intrusive ads.

I hate to break it to you, but as chrome adds those features it's going to slow down and get sluggish. Firefox has for some time beat Chrome on memory use. But, OTOH it's somewhat mooted by the fact that Chrome tends to spy and seems to thwart disabling intrusive ads.

That's why I use SRWare Iron. Google spyware removed from Chrome:)
As for features, let's see if Chrome slows down. The Google coders have been doing a better job than the Firefox ones for the last couple of years so perhaps Chrome will be able to grow and not slow down?

Boy, I wish I could mod this up. Iron is definitely a scam. (I was in the chromium irc channel when its developer came on the scene, and he openly admitted he was just playing on people's fears. It seems his goal is to make money with google ads on the download page.) Disclaimer: I used to work on Chromium at Google, now I'm just a happy user.

I was a long time advocate of Firefox until 3.x. I don't know if it's the fact that websites are more heavily scripted than before or if Firefox is just getting slower (or both!) but c'mon guys! Speed is key.

I was a long time advocate of Firefox until 3.x. I don't know if it's the fact that websites are more heavily scripted than before or if Firefox is just getting slower (or both!) but c'mon guys! Speed is key.

Ditto. I loved Phoenix->Firefox for a long time. But it has gotten to be like an old gas guzzling 1970s car!:) I am not sure I agree with the addage that features=bloat=slower application. Well coded applications can add features and not slow down -- it is possible!

-Are you on the same web pages in both browsers? Not all web pages take the same amount of memory (obviously). This can differ by a factor.

-When you're adding up the memory of each process, are you adding up the private working set? If you're on Windows XP with default setting, you're not, and thus the total memory usage is completely wrong with this way of adding it up.